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How did religion evolve from primitive beliefs in natural spirits to the major religions in the world today? Some scholars attribute the rise of religion as part of the evolution of the human species. Most of the great religions were formed during the “Axial Age,” a term coined by the German philosopher, Karl Jaspers in 1949. The Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE), was a pivotal period where major philosophical and religious traditions emerged across the globe, marking a shift in human consciousness toward abstract thought, self-reflection, and universal ethics, led by figures like Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato), and Hebrew prophets (Isaiah). This “Great Transformation” saw the rise of foundational ideas for modern civilizations, including concepts like the Golden Rule, individual conscience, and new understandings of justice, challenging older myth-based explanations. Christianity, and Islam followed several centuries later and are part of what some scholars refer to as the “Second Axial Age.”
Yet since these early beliefs were formed, science has provided evidence that the ancient stories in scripture often do not sync with reality. The creation story describes a process where the world was created in six days, was at the center of the universe, and that we humans are formed “in the likeness of God.” The Book of Genesis was written over a period of several centuries, with most scholars agreeing the scriptures reached their final form during or after the Babylonian Exile (6th-5th centuries BCE)—2,500 years ago–compiled from older oral and written traditions. Almost two thousand years later a Polish scientist and astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543 CE), placed the Sun, not Earth, at the center of the universe, described Earth’s rotation and its orbit around the Sun, marking the beginning of modern astronomy. Three centuries after that, in 1859 Darwin published the Origen of the Species, showing how animal life evolved over millions or years and that we humans were late arrivals. Then Einstein in 1905 published his theory of relativity, followed by extraordinary inventions and discoveries like black holes, the atomic bomb, subatomic particles and advances in technology with satellites, space stations, the Hubble and Web telescopes, the discovery of countless galaxies, and now AI.
Yet despite evidence to the contrary, beliefs in the creation story still prevail for many who are “religious people.” The ancient creeds that are still recited in many Christian churches were written in the Fifth Century CE, over a thousand years before Darwin. Yet following the Axial Ages religious beliefs and practices, the idea of religion in general and Christianity in particular have not changed very much. Knowing what we now know, does it make sense that God has a gender, that the we humans “look like God,” that the planet Earth is at the center of the Universe, and is the only place in the Universe where living creatures exist, that one branch of religion is “more true” than another, or that our destiny after we die is to spend eternity with God–or if we don’t measure up or “believe” the right things–to spend it in hell, wherever that might be?
As I have written about in earlier posts, the main reason for religion on the Planet Earth is that we humans can’t dismiss the idea of a Divine Being. We are spiritual creatures. We have no choice but to ask questions regarding the meaning of life and of our own lives. And there is evidence that we Homo sapiens are able to experience something we call “the Divine.” The prime example for Christians, of course, is Jesus of Nazareth who because of his faith, the way he lived his life, and the “human experience” of His resurrection, Christians believe He was God incarnate. Theologians have spent much of their lives trying to make sense of this. Of course, believing does not make it true. And for us humans the nature of the Divine ultimately remains a mystery.
And then there are questions about the existence of evil, why bad things happen to good people, and how it is hard to see how God can be all powerful and all good. And if there is a heaven, it seems there certainly must be a hell where all the evil people end up. My point is we just don’t know. Above our pay grade, as they say.
As more people become skeptics, drop out of church, and state they are “spiritual but not religious,” some theologians have dreamed of a “Third Axial Age,” which does a better job in reconciling science with religion and human experience. Despite my own skepticism about theological certainty, Embry and I have attended our small, neighborhood Episcopal church in DC for decades. We have hung in there for a variety of reasons. Embry loves singing in the choir, it is rewarding to hear an occasional really good sermon , and we are used to the liturgy. It is also important to us to be part of a warm, welcoming and diverse community. And while I remain skeptical regarding certain parts of the ancient creeds, I fully embrace what I think the central message of Christianity is: love your neighbor and do what you can to help make the world a kinder, more just and a gentler place.
Decades ago we took a close friend, who is a secular Jew and grew up without any exposure to Judaism or Christianity and who told us that she was curious as to what Christianity was all about. I selected an Episcopal church we had never been to but had the reputation of being the most avant guard and progressive church in the Diocese of Washington and which had a dynamic rector. I was disappointed to learn when we entered the church that the rector was on leave and a supply priest would be conducting the service and giving the sermon. It was a cold early spring morning and several pains in the stained glass windows were missing allowing the cold air in, and no more than three of four dozen people were present. In the middle of his sermon, the preacher proclaimed that it was time to split up into discussion groups to discuss the meaning of the phrase, “Man can’t live by bread alone but only by the very word of God.” I was both puzzled and flabbergasted. Nothing like this is supposed to happen in Episcopal churches. My friend and I joined a group of eight or nine people, with my Jewish friend thinking that this was normal. Someone asked her to start off the discussion with what she thought the phrase meant, which she cheerfully did saying something like “you should try to be nice to the people you work with.” The other people reacted with frowns and raised eyebrows and one a man stopped her in mid-sentence, saying in a gruff voice, “You have got to be kidding! This is ridiculous and an insult.” I immediately jumped in to defend her. With a recent degree from Union Theology Seminary in New York City, at the time the center of intellectual Protestantism, I reached deep into my understanding of theology and God that I had learned from my renowned professors. Satisfied that I had nailed it, I leaned back with a smile.
There was a moment of silence, then someone else said, “Is that it? Is that what you believe?”
I nodded with confidence. Someone else in the group in a gruff voice proclaimed, “Well, if that is it, why don’t you just join the Democratic Party?” Someone else muttered,
“You are just the kind of person we have been trying to drum out of here.”
After the service was over and we were walking out, I apologized for what had happened assuring her that this was not normal.
“Oh that,” she said, “That did not bother me, but did you hear what else they said in the service, “Eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus Christ? These people are cannibals!” I do not believe she has ventured again into another church or a synagogue of any type.
So with this post I conclude my Advent Series. I will return to bashing Trump, trying to understand the difficult and trying times we are in, weighing in on the major issues of the day as I understand them, and telling some of my favorite stories. In the meantime, Christmas is coming up in less than a week. Though Christmas is a Christian holy day, the secular world has embraced it as a time for families and good friends being together, enjoying giving presents, and having a good meal. Whether you are Christian or not or even “religious,” there is something special–and, yes, even spiritual–about families and good friends getting together to enjoy each other’s company.
Merry Christmas!

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There are several factors that have made Christianity the most popular religion in the world. While the era of Colonialism by European Christian countries over African and Asian countries certainly contributed to this, my focus in this post is on the message of Christianity, the early church, and the historical context. Here is a summary of the basic “facts” as I understand them:

About 2,500 years ago, a Jewish man named Jesus who lived in Galilee, which was then part of northern Judea, a Jewish Colony in the Roman Empire, began a ministry of healing and proclaiming that the kingdom of God was happening on Earth. The main points of His message were these:

• God’s reign is breaking into the world.
• To participate in God’s kingdom, you must repent (“Come back to God.”).
• You should love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.
• You should practice humility, mercy, justice, and peacemaking.
• Your faith in God is expressed by obedience and changed behavior, not just words.

In other words, in essence, Jesus’ message was an urgent invitation to acknowledge and be part of God’s reign, align one’s life with His will, and become a part of God’s Kingdom, both in the present age and in its future fullness. That remains the central message of Christianity today and has had an impact not only on people who call themselves Christians and try to follow this message but also for Western secular culture and values.

The ministry of Jesus resonated with the people he met, mostly Jews. In addition to His charismatic preaching, he healed the sick, raised the dead and performed many miracles. He illustrated his message by telling stories or parables. His ministry was short, lasting only about three years (by some accounts only one year) and according to most historians at the time of his death He probably had at most only a few hundred followers. Because of his perceived threat to the establishment, however, both Romans and Jews, He was crucified and died a painful death.

Outside of the Bible there was not much written about Him. The only two non-Biblical, secular sources which mention Jesus briefly are accounts by two Jewish historians: Josephus (c. 37–100 CE), who only mentions Jesus once, as the brother of James. and Tacitus (c 56-120CE) , who wrote “Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius”. All the other information about Jesus is from the New Testament of the Bible. The first Gospel (Mark) was not written, however, until the mid 60s, a generation after Jesus’s death, though the Apostle Paul wrote extensively beginning in the mid 30s, only about seven years after the crucifixion. In other words: no breaking news, no TV coverage, photos or “proof” from eyewitnesses.

One question that comes to mind is what was unique about Jesus and his teachings. Jesus actually shared key traits with earlier Jewish prophets like Moses, Elijah, and Elisha. They were all divine messengers appearing in times of bondage. And they all performed miracles, called people to repentance, interceded for Israel, faced rejection and persecution by authorities, and were seen as fulfilling prophecies. Jesus also was like the prophet Moses (Deuteronomy 18), who led God’s people to a new freedom, though Jesus’s fulfillment focused on spiritual liberation from sin rather than political liberation. He has also been compared to Buddha. In other words, His message and His ministry were not that different from that of many who came before Him. And Jesus is considered a prophet and holy man by the religion that followed, Islam.

What happened? How and why did Jesus of Nazareth become Jesus the Christ and the cornerstone of the most popular religion on the Earth?

Answer: The Resurrection. Were there no Resurrection, there would be no Christian church.
But that is not a wholly sufficient answer either because Jesus was not the only holy person who we read about that was resurrected from the dead. People resurrected in religious texts include biblical figures like Lazarus, Jairus’s daughter, the Shunammite’s son, and Eutychus, raised by prophets. Myths also mention figures like the Hindu Hanuman, Ashwathama or Greek heroes such as Heracles, who attained immortality rather than a return to normal life. These accounts are found in scripture and mythology across all cultures.

But some would argue that Jesus was also the son of the Virgin Mary, and that wisemen had come to witness his birth. Plus a star pointed people in the direction of the stable where he was born. That must account for something, right? Sorry, belief in virgin births in those days was not that unusual either, and the birth stories about Jesus did not develop until well after the resurrection. People born of a virgin, often through divine conception or parthenogenesis, appear in many myths–Krishna in Hinduism, Buddha in Buddhism, Horas in Egypt Romulus and Remus in Rome.
So, the riddle is still not solved. Besides his message, Jesus was not all that different from some Jewish prophets, from others in Greek and Indian culture who are said to have risen from the dead, and others who were said to be born from a virgin.

There are in my thinking three major factors that account for the rise of Christianity. The first is the Apostle Paul. The second is the timing in history and the culture of Roman Empire. The third is the conversion of Constantine, the Emperor of the Roman Empire. Were it not for the Apostle Paul, for the Roman Empire, and for Constantine it is unlikely that the fledging Christian religion would have taken hold.

Paul’s conversion occurred on the road to Damascus in the mid-30s AD, roughly 4–7 years after Jesus’s crucifixion in 30/33 CE. He was on his way to arrest Christians when he had a vision of the resurrected Jesus, which led to his conversion to Christianity. Most scholars place the event between 33 and 36 CE. A blinding light from heaven surrounded Paul, and he heard the voice of Jesus asking why he was persecuting him. Paul was blinded for three days and was then led to Damascus. After this, he was baptized and began his new life as a follower of Christ.

Paul was a brilliant, intellectual rabbi who spoke Aramaic and could read and write Greek and who had inexhaustible energy and realized where the low hanging fruit was—not in Judea where the Jews lived but throughout the Roman Empire where philosophy had run its course and people were thirsting for something more spiritual and authentic. By that time there were so many gods in the Roman Empire you could not count them all. He took the show on the road for the next 30 years before his death in Rome in 65 CE, about the same time that the Gospel of Mark, the first of the four gospels, was written. The Apostle Paul took three major missionary journeys recorded in the Book of Acts (Acts 13-21), focusing on spreading Christianity in Asia Minor and Greece, with a notable long stay in Ephesus during the third. Some scholars propose a fourth journey, potentially to Spain and including his later release and travels to Rome as a prisoner, though these are less clearly defined in Acts than the first three. His message resonated with people confused by the plethora of deities and exhausted by Neoplatonism.
Paul is the first–or at least one of the first –to make the connection between the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and the nature of God. His conclusion was that Jesus was God because of the resurrection. This became the central message of Christianity along with the idea that because Jesus was God’s Son and died on the cross, this sacrifice meant that those people who repent are forgiven of their sins. This was the main message that Paul preached and remains a central tenet of Christianity.
While Paul was successful in spreading the news about Jesus, it was quite a challenge. No one knows the exact number, but when Paul died in 67 CE Christians were still a small, scattered movement, likely numbering in the tens of thousands globally, a tiny fraction less than one percent of the Roman Empire’s population.

A question is why did so many buy into the idea that Jesus was the “Son of God.” It seems like it would involve a big step (“leap of faith”) and it did. The religion grew much faster in Asia Minor than it did in Palestine. And in those days in Greek and Roman religions it was not unusual for human-like creatures also to be divine. In ancient Greece and Rome, humans became divine as demigods (offspring of gods and mortals like Hercules), through a process called apotheosis (elevation to godhood after death for heroes or emperors like Romulus and Augustus), or by gods temporarily taking human form to interact with mortals, creating figures like Ino (who became the sea goddess), blurring the line between human and deity in a spectrum of divine potential.

In other words Greek and Roman religions profoundly influenced Christianity’s development, providing its language (Greek New Testament), administrative structures (dioceses, basilica design), theological concepts (“Logos,” soul immortality from Plato, and mystery cult rituals like baptism), and even the framework for Jesus’s divine status, blending Hellenistic philosophy and Roman imperial ideas with its Jewish roots to create a universal faith.

And in those early days there was no guarantee that a stable Christian church would survive. For that you can thank the Roman Emperor Constantine, who was himself considered by many to be “the Son of God” (The Sun God). He had a Christian vision (the Chi-Rho symbol) before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312 AD), required his troops to put the symbol on their shields, and against great odds won the battle against his brother, which led to his conversion. He legalized the fledging religion, funded the Church, and called key councils (in Nicaea) charged with coming up with creeds which stipulated what Christians were supposed to believe and which to this day are recited in some Christian services including my own church, All Souls Episcopal in Washington. Here are the figures from AI:

• 33 CE: The Christian movement is generally believed to have started with a very small group, probably no more than around 100 followers.
• 40 CE: approximately 1,000 Christians.
• 60 CE: an estimated 1,000–6,000 Christians.
• 100 CE: Between 7,000 and 25,000 believers, or roughly 0.01% to 0.02% of the Roman Empire’s population.
• 150 CE: 40,000 Christians.
• 200 CE: 200,000–218,000 Christians, making up approximately 0.36% of the population.
• 250 CE: 1.1 million–2 million (about 2% of the population).
• 300 CE: Approximately 6 million, or about 10% of the total population.
• 350 CE: The Edict of Milan in 313 CE proclaimed by Constantine ended major persecutions. The number of Christians grew dramatically, reaching as many as 34 million (over 50% of the Roman population).

 

So what are we to make of all this? How should this affect our own individual faith or spiritual journey? Well, it should be a wakeup call for the fundamentalists, evangelicals, MAGAs and others who think they have everything figured out and that anyone who disagrees is doomed to hell, which of course would include me. Sorry guys, your idea is not the way that this happened.

But where does this leave the rest of us? A lot of my friends have nothing to do with church anymore. Some have given up on Christianity, especially in our children’s generation, and declare that they are “spiritual but not religious,” having nothing to do with formal church. I can understand that and do not condemn it. Churches do not have a glorious track record themselves, and many are ghastly. So, can you really be legitimately spiritual but not religious? Of course you can. To put this in perspective I return to my first post in this series—the universe. We humans get so caught up in trivial matters that we often miss the Big Picture.

The Big Picture is that our universe is 13.8 billion years old, our solar system two billion years old and that we live on a planet that is in the Goldilocks Zone of a solar system that is part of a run-of-the-mill galaxy and that now scientists believe there are several trillion galaxies. We Homo sapiens on our small planet are newbies and merely a grain of sand on an infinite beach. We do not have and never will have all the answers. To suggest otherwise is preposterous. It is above our pay grade. So we grasp at straws to try to make sense out of the world. Religion is one of those straws and one that at least 75 percent of the eight billion people on the planet tell the Pew Foundation that they turn to. More than 25 percent of the world population identify as Christians. Many say that they have experienced and do experience the Divine. I also believe this. I have had these experiences myself though rare. Religious experiences are legitimate and provide clues that yes, there is more to our existence than what science tells us.

Also keep in mind that there are enormous differences in theology, ritual and practice within the Christian Church. Roman Catholics, Russian, Greek and Eastern Orthodox church members, and Protestants are all different. And within the Protestant sector, you also have denominations that differ in theology, belief, and practice. Some are fundamentalists, who believe every word of the Bible is written by God, some who “speak in tongues,” some who say the ancient creeds (and many who don’t), and some who think that Donald J Trump is the new Jesus Christ. My beliefs are far more in sync those of with my Buddhist son-in-law than with MAGAs and many of the evangelicals. A visitor from another planet would probably conclude that Christianity is actually not one religion but many.

So that brings us up to the current time. Where are we headed next as people of faith or as people who say they are spiritual but not religious or as skeptics who question the validity of all religions but are curious as to where we are headed? That will be the topic of the next and final post of “Advent Reflections 2025.”

 

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Just posted my second in a four-part Advent  series on Substack. You should have the link and hopefully have made the transition.

 

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In case you missed it, go to the link to my Substack. This is the first of  four posts on the subject of religion and the meaning of life.

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